True Tales of Three Cities

David Maraniss is an associate editor at the Washington Post, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton; Rome 1960: The Olympics that Stirred the World; Barack Obama: The Story; Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero; They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967; and When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi. His latest book is Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story (Simon & Schuster). It was 1963. The time was full of promise.  It was the American auto makers’ best year; Reuther’s UAW had helped lift the middle class. The auto industry was selling more cars than ever before and inventing the Mustang. Motown was capturing the world with its amazing artists. Once in a Great City shows that the shadows of collapse were evident even then. Before the devastating riot. Before the decades of civic corruption and neglect, and white flight. As Maraniss captures it with power and affection, Detroit at its peak was threatened by its own design.

Juliana Barbassa was born in Brazil, but she had a nomadic life between her home country and Iraq, Malta, Libya, Spain, and France before settling in the United States. Barbassa began her career with the Dallas Observer, where she won a Katie Journalism Award in 1999. She joined the Associated Press in 2003, and after two more awards from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the APME, she returned to Brazil in 2010 as the AP’s Rio de Janeiro correspondent. Her debut book is Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink (Touchstone) a deeply reported and beautifully written biography of the seductive and chaotic city of Rio de Janeiro.

Les Standiford is the bestselling author of more than twenty books and novels, including the John Deal mystery series, and the works of narrative history The Man Who Invented Christmas (a New York Times Editor's Choice) and Last Train to Paradise. He is the director of the creative writing program at Florida International University. In Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles (Ecco), Les Standiford tells the story of the largest public water project ever created—William Mulholland’s Los Angeles aqueduct. One of the greatest civil engineering feats in history, the aqueduct that carried water 223 miles from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Los Angeles—allowing this small, resource-challenged desert city to grow into a modern global metropolis. Drawing on new research, Les Standiford vividly captures the larger-than-life engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23 million project that would transform a region, a state, and a nation at the dawn of its greatest century. At a time when the importance of water is being recognized as never before, Water to the Angels sheds critical light on a past that offers insights for our future.